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V. The Empty Chairs · Augusta: The Lost Commentaries of Julia Agrippina

• V. The Empty Chairs Translator: Augusta. The Lost Commentaries of Julia Agrippina. Episode five. The Empty Chairs. Chapter Four. The Empty Chairs. Entry one. The commentary has moved house. Julia is writing now in AD 50, at thirty-four, in a study on the garden side of the palace. She was given the title Augusta in the spring, the first woman to hold it while her husband lived, and her grandmother's archive room has been shut. What she has on the new table is a seating plan for a dinner given by Antonia Minor on the fourth of June, AD 21. Antonia is fifty-six and the dinner is for eleven. Julia is five, there to be seen and taken out again. Her brothers Nero, fifteen, and Drusus, thirteen, are the sons of Germanicus and everything the family has. Across the table is the other house: Drusus the Younger, the emperor's son, thirty-four; his wife Livilla, also thirty-four, who is Germanicus's sister; and their boy Gemellus, who is two. And a man who is not on the first version of the plan: Lucius Aelius Sejanus, about forty-one, prefect of the Praetorian Guard, a knight from a provincial town who has become the most useful man in Rome. Sostrata, fourteen, recorded the evening. Julia recasts it from the plan and from the household's register of callers. Julia: AD 21 The seating plan for my grandmother's dinner of the day before the Nones of June, in the year my uncle Tiberius held the consulship for the fourth time with his son, is on the table in front of me, and I have been looking at it since the second hour, and I am obliged to record at the outset that I am doing this in a different room from the one I began in. The archive room in my grandmother's house is shut and this account is now kept in the palace, in the study on the garden side, which is a better room in every particular except that everything in it belongs to the office. The tables came over. Sostrata's chair came over, which caused more comment than the tables. The title came in the spring, with the adoption, and I am Augusta now while my husband lives, which no woman has been, and the chief practical difference it has made to my working day is that I am interrupted more. There are peacocks in that garden. I had not known there were peacocks and nobody warned me, and they begin at first light, and I have twice this month written a sentence, lost it to a peacock, and been unable to get it back. So. The couches. Dorus moved them on the day before the Nones and told nobody why, because nobody had told him. He was my grandmother's steward for thirty-one years and he moved furniture at her instruction and at nobody else's, and my grandmother did not give him that instruction, and I have the plan in her secretary's hand with the alterations marked in a second hand which is not hers and not Philargyrus's, and I have spent this morning failing to identify it. Here is what the plan says. The dinner was for eleven and it was ordinary. My grandmother Antonia gave four or five of them a year, everybody in Rome understood that they were not political occasions, and that is precisely what made them useful. She fed people and asked for nothing, and once a year or so somebody discovered at one of her tables that they were sitting next to a man they had been avoiding for eight months. On the first plan, the one written out clean, the middle couch has my grandmother, my uncle Claudius, and Nero Caesar, who was fifteen and the eldest of us and my father's heir in every sense the word carries. Drusus Caesar is beside him. On the left-hand couch there are the two of us who were small, myself and Drusilla, which means we were there to be seen and taken out again. On the right there is Drusus, the son of Tiberius, with Livilla his wife, who was also my father's sister and my aunt twice over, and the child Gemellus, who was two and who was brought in and held up and taken away. On the amended plan the middle couch has Drusus, Livilla and Gemellus. Nero Caesar and Drusus Caesar are moved to the left. My grandmother stays where she is, because the woman whose house it is cannot be moved without the whole thing becoming visible. And Lucius Aelius Sejanus, who was not on the first plan at all, is written into the place at the end of the right-hand couch nearest the door to the inner rooms, which is the seat everybody in the empire had to walk past to reach the man on the middle couch, and which is the seat a prefect of the guard takes when he is doing his work, and which is also, on any evening when nothing is happening, simply the seat by the door. It took a steward twenty minutes. I was five. I have nothing of that evening at all except one thing, which is that I was told where to sit and it was not where I had sat the last time, and I said so, out loud, in the way a child of five says a thing that has gone wrong with the world, and my grandmother said that this was where I was sitting tonight and I sat there. Sostrata was fourteen and was standing at the wall and has the rest of it, which is that Nero Caesar noticed, and that he looked at the middle couch for about as long as it takes to draw a breath and then went where he was put and was pleasant for four hours. He was fifteen. He had been told since he could speak that he was Germanicus's son and that this meant something, and he found out on that evening, in front of eleven people and a household, that it meant something less than it had meant at the last dinner, and he ate his food and made his grandmother laugh twice. He was dead ten years later on Pontia, starved, at twenty-five, and the man who did it had the seat by the door. Tiberius did not send the instruction, and I say that as a reading and not as a fact. He was in Campania that spring and had been for months, and the whole city was complaining, and my mother was complaining louder than the city, and the complaint was that the emperor had gone away and left the business of Rome to a knight from Volsinii. My reading is that he went so that everybody should have to deal with Drusus for a season, which is what a father does when he is arranging a succession and is not certain his son can carry it. The instruction to Dorus came out of Drusus's household or out of Sejanus's, and whichever it was, the other would have sent it, because at that date they were pulling the same way and had not yet found out that it was not the same way. I cannot prove a word of it. What is on the table is a steward's plan with two hands on it and a boy of fifteen going quietly to the wrong couch. Now Gaul, which belongs to that summer. There was a rising in Gaul that year. Julius Florus among the Treveri and Julius Sacrovir among the Aedui, both of them Roman citizens, both of them men whose fathers had been given the citizenship for services, and the trouble was debt and the weight of the tribute, and it went as far as the young men of the Aeduan nobility being shut up in Augustodunum where they were at their schooling. Gaius Silius took the legions across from the Rhine and finished Sacrovir in a summer, and Florus killed himself in a wood, and by the autumn it was a thing men mentioned at dinner in the past tense. None of that reached me. I was five and nothing reaches a person of five except the temperature of the adults. What reached the house was the register. Callers to my grandmother's door ran at eleven and fourteen a week through the spring, went to thirty-one in the second week of July, and stayed above twenty for a month. She was the widow of Drusus and the mother of Germanicus and the only person in Rome who could put a word about the Rhine armies into the emperor's hands without it being an approach, and when there was a war in Gaul the men who wanted the command came to her door, and Hilarus wrote down their names, because he wrote down everybody's. Sostrata says she received all of them and refused all of them and did it so that not one of them went away able to say they had been refused, and that she was tired for the whole of that August in a way she did not usually get tired. The tables in this study belong to the office and so do the lamps and the men outside the door. The plan is a sheet of my grandmother's household paper with a dinner on it, and it is the one object in this room that came out of a house where somebody fed me. And I still do not know whose hand made the alterations. Philargyrus I have from eleven years of letter-book, my grandmother from the account books, Dorus from the stores, and it is none of the three. It is a small upright hand that has been taught. It appears on that sheet in four places and nowhere else in my grandmother's papers, which have now been gone through twice by two people who did not know what the other was looking for. Somebody came into that house, or sent into it, and altered the order of a dinner, and went away, and left four marks on one sheet. A month at this, with every document my family ever kept, and I am beaten by a steward's plan and a hand I cannot name. The sheet stays on this table until I can. Translator: Entry two. The same study, and a year on: AD 22. In the spring Tiberius, sixty-three, asks the Senate to give his son Drusus, thirty-five, the tribunician power, which is the Roman way of naming an heir without saying so. Julia's brothers, Nero, fifteen turning sixteen, and Drusus, thirteen turning fourteen, have begun receiving callers in the mornings, as young men of their rank do. The household clerk Hilarus, about seventeen, stands in the doorway and writes down who comes. Julia is six, and bored, and follows him down the hill to the Vicus Tuscus, a street of shops below the Palatine. Sostrata, fifteen, recorded the year. Julia recasts it in AD 50 from the register of the ninety-one men who called that year, read against what became of them. Julia: AD 22 Hilarus wrote down the names of everybody who came to my brothers' door in the year Drusus was given the tribunician power, and he wrote them into two books, and I followed him out of the room at six years old because I wanted to see where he went. I shall do the year first and then the corridor. Drusus, the son of Tiberius, received the tribunician power in the spring of that year, which is the thing the Divine Augustus gave to Agrippa and then to Tiberius himself, and which is not an office and cannot be pointed at and means that the man holding it is the heir. Tiberius asked the Senate for it in a letter and the Senate gave it, and the letter was read out and copied and was all over the city inside three days, and my grandmother had a copy in the house within the week because Philargyrus fetched one. I have that copy in front of me. It is careful in a way that repays reading twice. It praises Drusus and it does not praise him extravagantly, and in the middle of it there is a sentence about Germanicus, dead two and a half years by then, which says that the emperor would have wished to divide the burden between his two sons and that fortune had decided otherwise. Every word of that sentence is unobjectionable. What it does is put my father and Drusus in the same rank in a document that is establishing which of the two houses inherits, and then close the question by observing that one of them is dead. My mother took it as an insult. She took most things that year as an insult and she was right about roughly half of them and I have never been able to work out whether the half she was right about was worth the half she was wrong about, and I have decided this month that the question has no answer and that I have been asking it for twenty years because it is easier than the other question, which is what I would have done in her position. Now the doors, because the tribunician power changed what came through them. My brothers were fifteen and thirteen that spring, or sixteen and fourteen by the autumn, and they had begun to receive in the mornings. Nero Caesar received in the room off the second courtyard and Drusus Caesar received in the small room next to it, and they were boys and their callers were mostly their father's men, old officers and freedmen of the Rhine years and the clients of clients, and the whole thing had the flavour of a rehearsal, which is what it was. And every morning Hilarus stood in the doorway between the two rooms with a wax book and wrote down who came. Hilarus was seventeen or eighteen then. He is a clerk in the imperial correspondence office to this day, and I passed him in a corridor two months ago and he wished me joy of the title and has grown very stout and wears a scent I could smell from the far end of it. Neither of us mentioned any of what follows. I doubt he remembers it and I am not going to find out. He wrote the names into a wax book. Then, at the end of the morning, he made two fair copies. One went into the household register, which is the book I have and which has been in this family's papers for twenty-eight years. The other went out of the house. I know that because I followed him. I was six and bored, and there was a young man who came every morning and stood in a doorway and wrote and then went away at the same hour by the same route, and following him was the most interesting thing available to me that morning. Thirty years to invent a better reason and I have not found one. He went out through the service court and down the hill and across to the Vicus Tuscus and into the back of a house I did not know, and he was inside for the time it takes to hand something over, and he came out without it. I did not see who took it. I have never seen who took it. What I saw was a young man go in with a folded sheet and come out without a folded sheet, and I saw it from a doorway across the street where I was standing on my own in the city at six years old, which is the part of this that would have horrified my grandmother and which nobody ever found out about because I got home before the meal. The name I have for the man in that house is Satrius. The name did not come from that morning. Lucius Satrius Secundus was a client of Sejanus's and everybody in Rome learned it in the year Sejanus fell, when Satrius's own wife informed on the whole arrangement and he was destroyed by it. I got it at fifteen, out of a conversation I was not part of, and put it against a house on the Vicus Tuscus and a folded sheet nine years after I saw them. So: I saw a household clerk carry a copy of my brothers' visitors out of the house. I do not know that it went to Satrius. I know that a list of everybody who called on the sons of Germanicus was made in duplicate every morning for at least two years and that one of the two copies left the building, and I know what became of every man on it. I went through the register this week against what happened afterwards. It took four days and I had been putting it off for a decade. Ninety-one men in it for that year. Eleven were dead or ruined by the end of the year Sejanus fell, nine years later, and Titius Sabinus is the one everybody knows because of the roof. Four more went in the year after that. Fifteen out of ninety-one over ten years is not a slaughter and would not look like one to anybody counting. The fifteen are the top of the list. They are the men who came four and five times a year, who brought their sons, who had commanded something. The men at the bottom, the ones who came once with a petition and were seen for a quarter of an hour, are alive to a man. Somebody read that list the way I have just read it, as it was accumulating, and better, and drew a line at a place in it and worked down. I was six and I followed a clerk because he was going somewhere and I had nothing to do. Sostrata was fifteen. She has told me this week that she saw me come back in that morning and asked me where I had been and that I told her, all of it, immediately, because I was pleased with myself, and that she did not write it down. I asked her why she did not write it down. She said that she wrote down what was said at doors, and that this was a thing a child had done, and that she had eleven tablets and a fixed amount of wax and had to choose, and that she chose wrong. She has offered me that flatly and without apology and she is right that she chose wrong and I did not say so, and I have written here instead that she was fifteen, which is the nearest I am prepared to come to it this evening. Translator: Entry three. The second courtyard of Antonia's house, across AD 22 and 23. Three men come into it. Sejanus, about forty-one, who has taken to arranging Antonia's travelling escort in person. A senator named Marcus Aebutius Priscus, who chose the wrong morning to call. And a boy of twelve, Marcus Veturius Varro, carrying a petition for his father, Titus Veturius Varro, a centurion of the Praetorian Guard who cannot be seen at this door himself. Julia is six, then seven. Sostrata, fifteen, is in the colonnade with a jug. The other thing in the entry is a building going up on the Viminal hill that nobody in the house remarks on. Julia recasts it in AD 50, at thirty-four, with a plan of that building, the Castra Praetoria, the Guard's new camp, fetched this month. Julia: AD 22 There is a boy in this account now. He is twelve, he is carrying a petition his father cannot bring, and I destroyed him twenty-seven years later, and I am going to write the whole of it out anyway. His name is Marcus Veturius Varro. His father was Titus Veturius Varro, who was a centurion of the praetorian cohorts and had been a centurion of the Twentieth before that, on the Rhine, in the years my father held the armies, and who could not come to my grandmother's door himself because a serving praetorian centurion calling on the house of Germanicus in the year Drusus was given the tribunician power is a fact somebody writes down. So he sent his son with it, because a boy of twelve is furniture, and because Hilarus's book has a column for the caller and no column for the caller's father. The petition was about land. It always is. Thirty-odd men of the Rhine years had been settled on plots in Campania and the survey had been done badly and the boundaries in four of the plots overlapped a neighbour who had money, and they wanted the widow of Drusus and the mother of Germanicus to put a word somewhere. It is nine lines long and it is signed by every one of them, and eleven of the signatures are the same hand doing eleven different men's names, because eleven of them could not write and one of them could, and I have the sheet. He came in the middle of the morning and I was in the courtyard and Sejanus was there. I have thought a great deal about the order of the two things and I am now certain that Sejanus was there first and that the boy walked into it, because Sejanus had come about the escort for my grandmother's journey to Bauli, which is a thing the prefect of the guard would properly come about, and which he had been doing in person for about a year, and which nobody thought about because a prefect who arranges an escort in person is a prefect being conscientious. He was in the courtyard with a senator named Marcus Aebutius Priscus. I do not remember Aebutius. I have him from the register and from Sostrata and from what came afterwards. He was of praetorian rank, he had a brother-in-law in the treasury, and he had put his name to something in the Senate about the Gaulish settlement the year before which had gone against the way Sejanus wanted it to go. He had come to my grandmother's door for the same reason all of them came, and he had chosen the wrong morning. Sostrata was in the colonnade with a jug and was fifteen and she has given me this three times over the past month and it has not changed. She has also told me, unasked and twice, that he was shorter than she expected and that his voice was ordinary and that he had a way of standing with his weight on one leg like a man waiting for a barber. That is worth nothing to anybody and it is the only thing I have ever been told about Lucius Aelius Sejanus that does not go somewhere, and I am keeping it. Sejanus asked him three questions. The first was whether the treasury business was his brother-in-law's or his own, and Aebutius said his brother-in-law's, and Sejanus said good. The second was whether he had put his name to the Gaulish motion before or after he had spoken to Silius, and Aebutius said he had not spoken to Silius, and Sejanus said good, that is what I said. And the third was whether he was calling at this house often. Aebutius said something. Sostrata does not have the words and will not invent them. Sejanus said good, and told him it was a very fine house and that he came here himself, and asked to be remembered to his brother-in-law. Aebutius was prosecuted in the year after the next one, for the treasury business, which was his brother-in-law's, and the brother-in-law gave evidence and survived, and Aebutius did not, and I have the outline of it out of the record and there is nothing in the record about a courtyard. Every one of those three questions has a safe answer and Aebutius gave the safe answer to all three. What the questions do is establish, in front of a witness with a jug, that the man has been asked, that he answered, and that the answers are now on the record in the only place that matters, which is in the head of the man who asked. Aebutius went in to my grandmother and was received and given wine and went home, and I imagine he told his wife he had met Sejanus in a courtyard and that Sejanus had been perfectly pleasant. I have watched four men do that since and I have done it myself. And in the middle of that, before the third question, I dropped something. It was a wooden dog on a string with wheels for feet, which had been my brother Gaius's and which I had by then because Gaius was in Antioch and then on Capri and had left a great many things behind, and it went across the paving in that way things do. Sejanus went down on one knee and picked it up and gave it back to me and said something to me about the wheels, and then stood and asked Aebutius his third question. I have no memory of it. It comes from Sostrata, who has been telling it to me since I was about eleven, and it has been one of the household's small stories for thirty years, told the way households tell such things: the great man on his knee in the courtyard for a little girl's toy. Everybody who ever heard it liked it. My grandmother liked it. It went round the family as evidence that whatever else the man was, he was courteous to children. This month I have sat with it beside what I now know about that morning, which is that a senator was being taken apart eight feet away. Aebutius was looking at his own feet. Sostrata was a slave of fifteen with a jug. There was nobody else in that courtyard at all. He picked up the toy because a child had dropped a toy. I dislike that reading and I am keeping it. He was courteous to children. He was also, in the same four minutes, without changing his voice, doing the thing to Aebutius that he later did to my mother and my brothers, and there is no seam between those two facts, and I have looked for one in people my whole life and never found it in anybody, including myself. Then Varro came in with the sheet. He was twelve and he had walked from the Esquiline and he had the petition in a linen wrap because it was raining earlier, and he came into the courtyard and Sejanus was standing in it, and the boy stopped. I took the sheet off him. I was six and I do not know why. There is nothing underneath it. A boy came in holding a paper, there was a man in the courtyard who had gone down on his knee for me four minutes earlier and whom I had no reason on earth to be afraid of, and I took the paper out of the boy's hands and put it under the front of my dress and stood there. Sejanus finished with Aebutius and went in to my grandmother about the escort. Varro got his sheet back in the passage a quarter of an hour later, with the wrap creased, and he gave it to Philargyrus, and my grandmother put the word somewhere, and four plots in Campania were resurveyed the following spring. And he remembered it. That is the part that matters and it is the part I have paid for. He has told me about it perhaps five times in twenty-seven years, at intervals, always in the same words, always as a thing that happened to him rather than a thing I did, and always with the same small correction at the end, which is that I did not know what I was doing. He is right. I did not. He has known me since I was six years old and he is the only person alive who ever helped me without wanting anything, and he has been perfectly clear the entire time that he does it because of a girl of six in a courtyard who acted before she thought, and not because of anything I have been since. Now the other thing about that year, and it is the thing this whole account is actually about, and it made no impression on anybody in that house whatsoever. They began building on the Viminal. Sejanus had the nine cohorts of the praetorians and they had always been billeted about the city in lodgings, three cohorts here and two there, in among the insulae, and men going to their duty out of a dozen different streets, which is how Augustus arranged it and which he arranged that way on purpose. In the year after this one Sejanus put a proposal to Tiberius that the cohorts be gathered into a single camp outside the Colline gate, and the reasons given were discipline, and the price of lodgings, and the difficulty of assembling men who are scattered, and every one of those reasons is true and any officer would give them. It was granted. They built it in the year I turned eight. Varro's father was moved into it. That is how it came into the house, and it came in as a complaint, because Titus Veturius Varro had lodgings on the Subura with a wife in them and twenty-two years of knowing his neighbours, and he was now to live in a barrack outside the wall with his cohort, and the boy said so in the passage, to me, at thirteen, in the tone of a boy repeating a grievance he has heard at home and does not understand. We could hear it from my grandmother's house on a still day. Not the building. The carts. Nobody in that house said one word about it that anybody has ever repeated to me. My grandmother did not remark on it. My mother, who remarked on everything, and who was at that date writing to people about being watched, did not remark on it. There is nothing in the register and nothing in the letter-book and nothing in any of Sostrata's tablets for those two years except the boy's complaint about his father's lodgings, which she wrote down because it was said at a door. The plan of the camp was fetched for me this week. It holds nine cohorts, it is a quarter of an hour at a walk from the Palatine and forty minutes at a run for men whose kit is in one place, and before it was built there was no hour of any day on which more than three of those cohorts could be brought together anywhere. Everything that has happened to my family since happened because that camp exists. My brothers, my mother, Gaius in the corridor with Chaerea, the fifteen thousand a man that bought my husband the empire in an afternoon, and this study, and me in it. One man asked for it, in writing, for reasons about lodgings, and got it, and it took a year to build, and the only person in my family who noticed was a boy of thirteen who was annoyed on his father's behalf about the move. Translator: Entry four. The same study, with two things on the table: the tablets for September AD 23, and a second letter up from Baiae, from the son of the freedwoman Julia has been trying to send for. The September business is the house of Drusus the Younger, the emperor's son and heir, thirty-six, who dies there on the fourteenth of September after some weeks of illness. His wife Livilla is thirty-six; her physician, Eudemus, is in attendance. Antonia, fifty-eight, is in the house for the last four days, and so, because the children went where she went, is Julia, seven, in a corridor, counting. Sostrata, sixteen, recorded what Julia said about it: four sentences. Julia has not expanded them, and declines to. Julia: AD 23 The letter from Baiae came up while I had the September tablets open in front of me, and I am going to put the two of them on the same page because they arrived on the same table and because I have spent the evening going back and forth between them. Eutyches has answered. He clerks in the grain office at Puteoli and he is about forty and I have never met him and I had not intended him to have any part in this, and this is now the second letter he has written to the wife of the First Citizen in five weeks, and both of them are better than anything I have had out of the Senate this year. He does not refuse. He does not ask for money and he does not ask for a place and he does not ask for protection, which are the three things I had a form of words ready for. He asks that his mother be summoned. Not invited. Summoned, in form, by an officer of a court, in a matter of record, with the matter named and the summons written and a copy kept, so that Statia goes to Rome because she is required to go and not because she has been asked to go by me. I read it twice before I understood it and then I sat back and said something out loud that I shall not write down. Here is what he has worked out, at Puteoli, in a grain office, in eleven days, with no help from anybody. A freedwoman of the house of Antonia who travels up from Baiae to the Palatine at the private request of the emperor's wife has chosen a side, and every person on that coast who cares to notice will notice, and the notice will not come from me and cannot be answered by me and will arrive at her door about a month after she gets home. A freedwoman who is compelled to appear as a witness in a matter of record has chosen nothing at all. She has been made to go. She can say so. She can say so to Publius Suillius Rufus, who has people in three households between Baiae and Cumae and who has hated me since the year I came back from the islands, and Suillius can read the summons himself and find my name nowhere in it. The man has asked me for the one thing that would make his mother safe, and he has asked for it as a favour, in nine polite lines, and it is the one thing I cannot give him. There is no matter of record. There is a woman of fifty who put a tray down in a room thirty years ago. To summon her in form I should have to make a matter, and to make a matter I should have to put Statia's name into a document that goes into a court and stays there, and that document will be in Rome after I am dead and after her son is dead, with her name in it, in a proceeding I invented, and any man who ever wants to know why the Augusta went to the trouble of compelling a freedwoman out of Campania will have the whole thing in front of him on one sheet. He cannot know that. He is a good clerk and he has reasoned from the forms he has, and the forms he has are the forms of the grain office, where a thing written down is a thing that is safe, and I have spent my life in the other trade, where a thing written down is the thing they hang a man with. Sostrata has read it and has said nothing about it at all, which she is entitled to do, since she put her objection in writing five weeks ago and I overruled it and I have not asked her to revisit the matter. I have not answered him. It will have to be done by the market day. I also had my dinner brought in here and let it go cold twice, and Sostrata has said nothing about that either, and has had it taken out and brought back a third time, and I ate it standing up. Now September, and I am going to be brief about it and then set down the reason I am being brief. Drusus, the son of Tiberius, died on the eighteenth day before the Kalends of October in the year Gaius Asinius and Gaius Antistius were consuls. He was thirty-six. He had held the tribunician power for a year and a half and he was the heir, plainly, in a way that could be pointed at, which is what the tribunician power is for. He was ill for some weeks before it and then better and then ill again. The household understood it as his stomach, and he was known to have a bad stomach and had been known to have one for years, and there was a physician of Livilla's in attendance named Eudemus who had been in that house a long time. I was seven. I was in that house for the last four days of it because my grandmother was there and the children went where she went, and I was put in a corridor with the other small ones and told to be quiet, and what I did instead of being quiet was count. I counted the people going in and out of the room, which is a thing to do when one is seven and has been told to sit still, and I counted them for four days, and on the third day I heard two men talking in the corridor about a cup, and I did not know what they meant. Livilla came out into the front of the house twice a day and wept where the clients were. I have that from Sostrata, who was sixteen and standing where the household stands. Sostrata says it was well done and that the woman was not pretending, and I have asked her twice this month whether she wishes to change that and she does not. He died in the afternoon and the house went up and my grandmother took us home the same night. And Sostrata wrote down what I said about it, and it is four sentences, and here they are entire. Drusus Caesar died in the afternoon. He was sick a long time before and they said it was his stomach and he got better twice. The lady Livilla and the physician went in and the other people were sent away, and I counted, and it was eleven people sent away and two people not sent away. I could not see the table so I do not know about the cup. That is the whole of the entry. It is in Sostrata's hand, dated, on the third tablet of that year, and it has been in this family's papers for twenty-seven years and I read it for the first time this spring. Set beside the public account, which is that the emperor's son died of an illness and that the emperor bore it with the greatest fortitude and came into the Senate and told them to go on with the business, and which is true in every particular. I have written nothing under those four sentences. Sostrata has asked me twice whether I want the entry filled out, since I am filling out everything else in these three years, and I have said no twice, and the second time she asked in a way that made it clear she was asking a second time on purpose. I am not going to fill it out. I have my reasons and I am keeping them, and I am aware that this is the first place in this account where I have refused to say a thing I know, and I am recording the refusal so that it is at least on the page, and that is as far as I intend to go tonight. The count is correct. I have checked it against the household's own list of who was in that house, and eleven people were sent away from that door in four days, and every one of the eleven had a right to be there. Nobody has ever suggested to me that a seven-year-old in a corridor was doing anything but being a nuisance. The letter and the tablet are going back in the box. A man trying to keep his mother out of a record, and a girl of seven who was put into one without anybody noticing, and they were on the table together all evening. Translator: Entry five. Two rooms. The audience room in the house of Livia, who is eighty, being shut up for the season in the autumn of AD 23, a few weeks after Drusus's death, with Antigone tying the covers over the chairs. And a store room off the second courtyard of Antonia's house, where a loom weight sits on the floor. Julia is seven. Sostrata is sixteen. This is the entry where the record changes hands: the first thing in the whole commentary in Julia's own writing, made that night, in a substitution cipher Sostrata taught her as a game. A second copy went under the loom weight. Julia recasts it in AD 50. Julia: AD 23 Antigone took me through the audience room at my great-grandmother's house in the autumn after Drusus died, and the chairs were being covered, and she told me who had sat in each of them. The room first, because the room is the point. Livia's audience room on the Palatine was small and plain and held perhaps twenty at a squeeze, and there were nine chairs in it that stood against the wall and were never moved for anybody. They were the ordinary chairs and two of them had been mended. They stood there because the people who sat in them had sat in them, and a chair that a particular person sits in stops being furniture at about the fourth or fifth time and becomes a fact about the house. Every household in Rome has two or three of these. That house had nine. That autumn the room was shut up for the season and the covers went on, and Antigone had the doing of it, and she took me round with her because I was seven and underfoot and she had learned by then that the way to get an hour's work out of me was to give me something to hold. I held the tally stick and she went along the wall. She said the names the way a woman says names while she is working, one to a chair, in the order they stood, and went on tying the covers while she said them. Thirty years to decide whether that was deliberate, and I have decided it was, and that the deliberate part was the tone and not the words. I do not have all nine. I have five and I have had them since that afternoon and I have never had to check them. Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa. My great-grandfather, who married Livia's daughter's mother, which is a sentence I have had to write four ways to get right, and who died before I was born and whose name I carry. Gaius Caesar and Lucius Caesar, one chair each, the two grandsons the Divine Augustus adopted and made his heirs and lost inside eighteen months of each other, one in Lycia and one at Massilia, at twenty-three and nineteen. Nero Claudius Drusus, my grandfather, dead in Germany off a horse at twenty-nine. Germanicus. Antigone said my father's name in exactly the same tone as the other four and did not look at me and went on tying, and I looked at the chair, and it was a chair. I asked her, and this is the only thing I said in that room and I have it word for word because I have carried it, whether the chairs were sad. She said no. She said they were where people sat. And then she said the other thing, and she said it in the same working voice, and I did not understand it for years and then I did. She said that every one of those nine had been the next thing. Not one of them had been a man who might be, or who was hoped for, or who had a claim. Every one of them had been settled, arranged for, provided in a will or a decree or a marriage, and everybody in Rome had known what was going to happen next, and then it had not happened, and she said that she had covered these chairs every autumn for forty years and had put a cover over the certain future six times. That is what a woman of Livia's household said to a child of seven while she was doing the linen, and I do not believe for a moment that she said it to me by accident, and I have wondered since whether she said it to Sostrata as well and got the same use out of it, and I have never asked her because Antigone has been dead thirteen years and there is nobody to ask. I went home and I told Sostrata about the chairs, all of it, at speed, the way I told her everything that year. And Sostrata, that night, taught me the cipher. It was not a lesson. She has been quite firm with me about that this month and I accept the correction. She did it as a game and she did it because I was seven and had been told twice that day to be quiet and had been in a house where a man had died six weeks earlier, and she wanted an hour with me in which I was doing something instead of being managed. It is a letter for a letter. Antigone had it off somebody in Livia's house years before and there is nothing clever in it and any man with an afternoon could break it. It is for making a tablet on a table in a room full of household staff look like a child's practice, which it did for eleven years. We did our own names first. Then the names of the chairs, because that was what was in my head, and I put five names into wax in a substitution alphabet at seven years old with a girl of sixteen correcting my letters, and it is the first thing in this whole commentary in my own hand. Every page before it is Sostrata's, which I have written about already. Then she did the second one. She wrote the same thing out a second time, on a second tablet, while I watched, and she said that a thing worth keeping is worth keeping somewhere. She did not tell me where she had got the sentence. She put the second tablet under the loom weight in the store room off the second courtyard. The loom weight is a stone with a hole in it and it weighs about four pounds and it sat on the floor at the end of the second shelf and it had sat there since before either of us was born, and there was a hollow in the boards under it because the floor had given a little in forty years, and a tablet fits in a hollow like that with the weight back on top of it and nothing shows at all. We did that with every entry for the next eleven years, and with every entry for the twenty years since, in four houses and on two islands. In thirty years I have never once sat down and thought about what it means that the second copy of my life is kept by somebody else. I thought about it this evening and then went and did something else. The last thing, and it is about the letter from Baiae and I shall be plain about it. I had the courier who brought Eutyches' first reply asked what he had been paid, five weeks ago, because I wanted to know what it had cost the man to send it and therefore how frightened he was. That is in this account and I put it there. Two days ago I had the same courier asked a second question, which was whether anybody else had asked him the first one. Somebody had. In the week after he came up. Not by name and not by anybody he could describe beyond a freedman of the ordinary sort with a Campanian accent, and the question was put pleasantly and over a drink and the man answered it, because there is nothing in the world less dangerous than telling somebody what one was paid. So there is a person somewhere between Puteoli and this study who knows that Statia's son wrote to me, and who took the trouble to find out inside a week, and who has known it for five weeks longer than I have known that they know. Sostrata put her objection in writing five weeks ago. I have gone back and read it this evening. It is eleven lines and it says that a summons is a document, that a document is a name in a place, and that the danger to Statia is the fact of having been sent for, and that the testimony has nothing to do with it. She was right and I was wrong and I am not going to write anything else about it in this account, because there is nothing to write, because it is done. I am going to answer Eutyches tomorrow and I do not yet know what I am going to say. The store room at my grandmother's house was opened this week, since the archive was being cleared anyway, and the loom weight is where it was. Nobody has moved it in twenty-seven years. There is a tablet under it with five names on it in a seven-year-old's letters, in a substitution alphabet a slave girl invented for a game, and the names are Agrippa, and the two boys the Divine Augustus buried, and my grandfather, and my father. I have left it there. Translator: That was episode five, The Empty Chairs. Next episode is six, A Woman Injured. Augusta is a translation of The Lost Commentaries of Julia Agrippina.